


So I won't say it at all and I won't stay very long*

by nightfall_in_winter



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017), Call Me By Your Name (2017) RPF, Call Me By Your Name - All Media Types
Genre: 25 years into the future, Love, M/M, Nostalgia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-17
Updated: 2019-09-17
Packaged: 2020-10-20 12:21:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20675312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightfall_in_winter/pseuds/nightfall_in_winter
Summary: Timmy and Armie meet on Monet's berm 25 years after CMBYN to go over what life gave and took away from them.“Your hands are cold.” Mundane but safe start.“I know.” Acceptance and agreement but also some well-guarded detachment.“Some things never change”. I know you.“Only the ones that we never forget, Armie.” I remember everything, just like you.We are facing each other now. The curls are tame and sprinkled with salt and pepper here and there and the fine lines around his eyes lay bare some tenderness and quiet sorrow.“Can I?” I take his hand and breathe some hot air over his knuckles. Let me be more than a stranger, please.“Don’t…” A stranger can’t make me lose my sanity. Be a stranger. Please.





	So I won't say it at all and I won't stay very long*

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mystery88](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mystery88/gifts), [thecosmicfragments](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thecosmicfragments/gifts), [quima](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quima/gifts).

__________________  
On this otherwise ordinary day of my life, when the long wait melts into the sweetness of the clinking of his bike bell, all and nothing could happen. He insisted to come here on a bike, but he wanted to trace our steps from the past alone. 

Light metallic sounds that seem so familiar, yet so distant, wash over me with the timelessness and finality of a summer that passed through my fingers 25 years ago. Gleaming and careless, lively and gossamer, it still tickles me with the smell of ripe apricots, lavender soap and youth before opening the pages of a well-read book where every turned corner marks the unforgettable. 

The calm waters of the berm suddenly come alive with images that ripple the cold surface and swirl around like unsettled visions in a pensieve. 

Him. Jumping on my back. Laying in the fragrant grass. Small straws in his hair and specks of dirt on his white tee. Salty dew on his upper lip. Cicadas and finches’ sounds echoing in the heat of the afternoon. Mouth that opens in anticipation of my touch. And a lick as soft as a rose petal caressing my lips.

His steps behind my back send a sudden flash of terror to my brain. Am I hallucinating? My heart is a rebellious bird, but my feet remain grounded in the raised ridge that separates past from present and grief from hope. An invisible force pours molten lead in my shoes and curls my toes inwards to stop me from sinking in the eroded soil.

If I turn, he will dissolve in the dark silhouette of the mountain and his eyes will become one with the whisper of the poplar leaves. His soft laughter will ride the wind until it shatters into the tiniest fragments of unnamed joy where nothing of him will be recognisable anymore. And I need him here, all flesh and autumn clothes, to make any sense of us аnd our lives that reached all important milestones but failed to sustain happiness.

He somehow knows, so he won’t ask me to face him, at least not in this very first moment of our reunion when everything is so floaty and dream-like, it can vanish any second. A delicate hand pats my shoulder and all I want is to turn and place a kiss just above his wrist, where his vein pops out with the cruelty of passed youth. A chaste and unoffensive one, for I don’t want to scare him and push him away. 

“You are here.”, “You still can’t ride a bike!” “You are taller than I remember.”, “I was afraid you won’t be able to find the place”, “You have aged well” “Your taste in clothes has improved”. I have started this conversation in my mind in a thousand ways, but words have abandoned me today. In my head, where he belongs to me, I can be sentimental, sloppy and insecure on a bad day or I can tease him endlessly on a good one. Over the years, he has become my emotional barometer, a little safe port in my mind where I can moor all of my moods and questions and where no one can touch him. 

“Your hands are cold.” Mundane but safe start. 

“I know.” Acceptance and agreement but also some well-guarded detachment. 

“Some things never change”. I know you.

“Only the ones that we never forget, Armie.” I remember everything, just like you. 

We are facing each other now. The curls are tame and sprinkled with salt and pepper here and there and the fine lines around his eyes lay bare some tenderness and quiet sorrow.  
“Can I?” I take his hand and breathe some hot air over his knuckles. Let me be more than a stranger, please. 

“Don’t…” A stranger can’t make me lose my sanity. Be a stranger. Please. 

The cold fingers barely touch my stubble just over my jaw line before tracing the curve of my lips, like following a well-trodden path into familiar lands, where my weakness for him is palpable and predictable. I can try to resist it and pretend that my skin has forgotten his touch or collapse in him and sob confessions in his hair. 

Would he want to know about that old dusty suitcase that remained unpacked in the guest bedroom for months after Crema, keeping the scents of our summer trapped in the folds of my tees? And how I was afraid that if I let the scents go, I’d resign to normality and forget who I was with him? Can he face the enormity of all early evenings when I went to bed just to be alone with my thoughts of him? All silent smiles in the darkness when I hid my face in my pillow to stop myself from evaporating in my clouds of longing? Or the taste of every meal I cooked for him but fed to others while chasing the small consolation of giving that couldn’t reach the right receiver. 

In the short seconds when he explores my face, the one that will always be more his than mine, will he be able to bear the weight of all caresses and “I love you’s” I have uttered in others’ ears? Will he forgive me each small delusion I have ever nourished to convince myself that I made the right choice? And that the life I was meant to have only had him in it as a shadow of a distant memory? 

Will I break him with the simplest truth of all; that even when he was carved out of my fantasies, regrets and solemn ifs, he was still more real and more mine that anything else in this world? I ticked things off a list, I rallied around Christmases and birthdays with feigned enthusiasm, I travelled far and away, but my heart was always bound to this magical place in Capralba, where all my roads ended in the urge of one clumsy kiss, quarter of a century ago. People came and went, life changed and not so much, seasons melted together but my Timmy, the one I was supposed to forget, remained omnipresent in all the moments of fragility that marked my life.

Pretend or confess?

I do neither of these and I only seek the familiar plushness of his mouth instead. Almost on instinct, with the consciousness of a doomed person who drinks from a poison spring to quench an insatiable thirst. I taste hesitant autumn at first and the spiky edges of an overgrown hedge that guards the Timmy of the last two decades. The one I do not own and the only one the world will accept – the husband, the father and the most talented actor of our times. 

But when I whisper: “Look at me”, he comes back and kisses me with the brutal despair and want of every missed opportunity to be in my arms. At the back of his throat where our soft moans mix, an evergreen summer arises – precious and free of guilt. Ours. 

Later, much later, when I regain the ability to speak and the darkness has fallen around us, I might ask about the children, and her, and his new projects. Or just stay silent, unable to part from him and his soft arms around my neck. I’ll have his head on my lap and for a millionth time I’d wonder why everyone believes that time heals all wounds and hearts recover. And we will part in silence, each of us afraid to say too much and burst our frail little bubble where our only true life is the life that didn’t happen…

________________

**Author's Note:**

> *Futile devices lyrics


End file.
